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Salesforce today introduced new generative AI workflow tools for Sales Cloud and Service Cloud during its presentation at World Tour London. The new capabilities — Sales GPT and Service GPT respectively — are designed to simplify workflow and customer engagement for sales and service teams.
The company said the tools will enable teams to accelerate deal closures, anticipate customer needs and enhance productivity.
Salesforce’s AI solution, Einstein GPT, will power the new GPT services from the backend, operating within an open ecosystem using proprietary real-time data.
To address enterprise data security and compliance, Salesforce said that the Einstein GPT’s trust layer will protect sensitive customer data, preventing the large language models (LLMs) from retaining it and thereby maintaining data governance.
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“Through our new solution, we will be offering unique, trusted AI capabilities with embedded security, ethical guardrails, and guidance to catch potential problems before they happen,” Bill Patterson, EVP and GM of C360 applications at Salesforce, told VentureBeat.
Salesforce also announced plans to integrate trusted generative AI capabilities into the workflow of the company’s various other offerings, such as Marketing, Commerce, Slack, Tableau, Flow and Apex.
In line with other customer-centric vendors, Salesforce joins the wave of generative AI technology advancements with this announcement. Numerous tech giants and smaller vendors have unveiled or announced plans for integrations of generative AI in recent months.
Enhancing customer experience through generative AI
Salesforce emphasized the potential of generative AI to transform the roles of sales and service professionals.
In a recent survey by Salesforce of over 4,000 full-time employees, approximately 73% of workers expressed concerns about new security risks associated with generative AI. Despite these concerns, the majority (61%) already use or intend to use the technology in their work.
The survey also found that nearly 60% of those planning to use generative AI admit to a lack of knowledge about its implementation with respect to trusted data sources and data security.
“We believe that mainstreaming the power of generative AI is dependent on first building a foundation of trusted data, security and ethics,” Salesforce’s Patterson told VentureBeat.
The new generative AI offerings will assist CX and CRM vendors’ platforms automatically generate personalized emails. With Einstein GPT, Sales Cloud users can create relevant emails through Sales GPT using CRM data.
The company claims that sales reps will no longer need to take notes manually, as calls will be automatically transcribed and summarized. This should improve productivity by enabling prompt follow-ups.
Sales and service
Sales GPT encompasses the entire sales cycle, including account research, meeting preparation, and drafting of contract clauses. It offers AI-generated summaries and actions integrated with the Salesforce CRM platform, ensuring automatic updates.
Service GPT, for its part, will empower field service teams with AI-driven personalized responses, automatically generating them based on real-time customer data. The company asserts that this will enable service agents to expedite resolution of customer issues.
“With Service GPT, customer service teams can harness real-time data and AI they can trust to deliver experiences that help you stay ahead of the curve and scale highly personalized service to every customer,” explained Patterson. “Instead of manually drafting replies to common issues, service agents can use Service Replies to address customer problems quickly and accurately. By freeing time for service agents, they can better assist customers with more complex issues.”
Productivity plus security
Patterson pointed out that Einstein GPT will combine AI-powered productivity and data security in Sales GPT and Service GPT.
In addition to benefiting from the AI productivity enhancements provided by Einstein, which generates over 200 billion AI-powered predictions daily, users can rely on the zero-retention data policy of the Einstein GPT Trust Layer. This policy ensures responsible handling of users’ data and their customers’ data.
“AI has been integral to Salesforce for years as we’ve integrated Einstein AI technologies across the Customer 360 platform. Generative AI now has the potential to introduce exciting new opportunities across sales, customer service, marketing, commerce and IT, and there’s an undeniable level of enthusiasm to realize that potential,” said Patterson. “By unifying data with Data Cloud and Customer 360, organizations can now unlock a complete view of every customer, allowing them to create unique experiences.”